March 1, 1987

By CARYN JAMES

Wittgenstein Is Dead and Living in OhioThe Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace

TANLEY ELKIN, an author never accused of being a minimalist, once recalled his defense when an editor advised, ''Stanley, less is more.''

''I had to fight him tooth and nail in the better restaurants to maintain excess,'' Mr. Elkin said, ''because I don't believe less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin
and enough is enough.'' Today, nearly a dozen years later, the very mention of a first novel by a 24-year-old barely out of college might make a reader say, ''enough is enough'' - enough pared down, world-weary
creative writing projects. So ''The Broom of the System'' is an enormous surprise, emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's ''Franchiser,'' Thomas Pynchon's ''V,''
John Irving''s ''World According to Garp.'' As in those novels, the charm and flaws of David Foster Wallace's book are due to its exuberance - cartoonish characters, stories within stories, impossible
coincidences, a hip but true fondness for pop culture and above all the spirit of playfulness that has slipped away from so much recent fiction.

Cleveland in 1990 - the setting for most of the story - borders the Great Ohio Desert (or G.O.D.), a man-made area filled with black sand, meant to restore a sense of the sinister to Midwestern life. The confused heroine is 24-year-old Lenore Stonecipher
Beadsman who, despite her proximity to the sinister G.O.D., has a ridiculous life. Her friends hang out at Gilligans Isle, a theme bar; her grandfather designed a Cleveland suburb in the precise outline of Jayne Mansfield's body;
her brother Stonecipher Beadsman IV is nicknamed the Antichrist; and her boyfriend, Rick Vigorous, half of the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous, is insane about Lenore but impotent when he's with her, so he tells her stories
as a substitute for sex.

Poor Lenore is also under the influence of the great-grandmother for whom she was named, a woman who had been Wittgenstein's student and who has taught her great-granddaughter that words create reality. Gramma has convinced Lenore: ''All
that really exists of my life is what can be said about it.'' Circumscribed by what others say, Lenore feels not quite in control of her own existence.

When Gramma Lenore disappears from her room at the old folks' home, the search for her provides the book's flimsy plot. Her precious notebook from Wittgenstein's class has vanished as well, but Gramma has left other clues behind, such as
the ominous drawing scrawled on a label from a Stonecipheco Baby Food jar. (The family business is Gerber's top rival.) It depicts, Lenore guesses, ''the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves.
. . . The big killer question . . . is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself. I think that's why his head's exploded, here.'' She also suspects a connection between Gramma's disappearance and the way
Lenore's pet cockateel, Vlad the Impaler, has a new, enlarged vocabulary. (''Women need space, too,'' squawks the bird.) The heart of the novel, though, is its verbal extravagance and formal variations, reflecting
Lenore's belief that language creates and imprisons her. Beyond the comic narration of her life, there are excerpts from Rick's journal, transcripts of Lenore and Rick's individual sessions with their mutual psychiatrist,
the stories Rick tells Lenore. To her, those stories are the means by which Rick tries to control her; given Gramma's theories, Lenore might as well be a character in Rick's thinly veiled autobiographical tales. What's the
difference, Mr. Wallace seems to ask, between the real Lenore and the masked version in Rick's stories? And, by extension, what's the difference between the real-life reader and Lenore in ''The Broom of the System''?

Though such Chinese boxes are mere staples of metafiction, Rick's stories have a more interesting pattern, one Lenore can't see. These weird tales - of a woman who has a tree toad living in a small hollow in her neck, or of children who can
die from uncontrollable crying jags - depict families in distress. No family is as stressed out as the inscrutable line of Stonecipher Beadsmans, of course. With remarkable authorial control, Mr. Wallace makes Rick's stories suitably
awkward and cliched, yet affecting within the fictional world of the Beadsmans.

Mr. Wallace's collection of fragmented set pieces owes a lot to Wittgenstein's theory of language games - at least as Gramma demonstrates it. ''Which part of the broom was more elemental . . . the bristles or the handle?''
she asks her grandson. When he answers the bristles, she yells, ''Aha, that's because you want to sweep with the broom. . . . If what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental
essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window.''

Similarly, Mr. Wallace aims to create his own language game, a fictional system in which ''something's meaning is nothing more or less than its function.'' The philosophical underpinnings of his novel are too weak to support this,
though. There is too much flat-footed satire of Self and Other, too much reliance on Philosophy 101. (The Antichrist refers to his phone as a lymph node, so he can honestly tell his father he doesn't have a phone.) And the novel falls
off drastically at the end, when a tortured running joke turns into a contrived explanation and characters we expect to appear never show up.

But the author's narrative command carries him over the low spots. This is not, after all, a minimalist tightrope-walk where a few wrong choices can produce empty posturing instead of precisely understated fiction. A saving grace of excessive novels
is that a few missteps hardly matter; ''The Broom of the System'' succeeds as a manic, human, flawed extravaganza.

WANT TO PLAY HI BOB?

On television was ''The Bob Newhart Show.'' In the big social room with LaVache were three boys who all seemed to look precisely alike. . . . ''Lenore, this is Cat, this is Heat, this is the Breather,'' LaVache
said from his chair in front of the television. . . .

Heat and the Breather were on a spring-sprung sofa, sharing what was obviously a joint. Cat was on the floor, sitting, a bottle of vodka before him, and he clutched it with his bare toes, staring anxiously at the television screen.

''Hi Bob,'' Suzanne Pleshette said to Bob Newhart on the screen. . . . La Vache looked up from his clipboard at Lenore. ''We're playing Hi Bob. You want to play Hi Bob with us?'' He spoke sort of slowly. Lenore
made a place to sit on the luggage. ''What's Hi Bob?'' The Breather grinned at her from the sofa, where he now held the bottle of vodka. ''Hi Bob is where, when somebody on 'The Bob Newhart Show'
says 'Hi Bob,' you have to take a drink.''

''And but if Bill Dailey says 'Hi Bob,' '' said Cat, tending to the joint with a wet finger, ''that is to say, if the character Howard Borden on the show says 'Hi Bob,' it's death, you have to chug
the whole bottle.''